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Comment by pdq | Hacker News Reader

The problem when you have so much money to invest is that your customers need to actually invest it. It's much harder to invest $1-$5M at a time when you can just go back to the WeWork pool and drop $2B.

It's like painting a wall mural using fine tipped brushes, rather than wide paint rollers or a paint gun. You get the job done so much faster, but your quality will suffer tremendously.

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$100B is not that much money. (Note to self: you just said $100B isn't that much money. Get head examined.) Bezos can aggressively handle it. Gates aggressively can handle it. Buffett can aggressively it. What is so special about the Vision Fund that it wants to put its money in the likes of Uber and WeWork? I would think knowledgable VCs would do their due diligence and avoid these companies.

Investing into Uber at $47B isn't vision.

You're right, it isn't vision. Valuations are largely bullshit, so "at $47B" is finance trickery.

Buffet is sitting on $120B of cash: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/warren-buffett-has-a-122-bill...

Bezos isn't a VC, he owns the greatest demand engine the world has ever known, and that matters when spending money.

And Gates ? he deals, smartly, with much lower sums. His energy VC is for example, has $1B.

It's not so easy spending $40B-$50B in 3 years, like the vision fund did.

Bezos was a seed investor in Google in 1998. Bezos Expeditions is a massive family foundation fund.

> It's not so easy spending $40B-$50B in 3 years, like the vision fund did.

It is if you buy a few healthy companies instead of gambling in the early stage startup market.

Or maybe they did their due diligence and everyone else is wrong. We're talking like the companies have already collapsed while it could be the best investment ever.

What about scaling a VC organization ? With hundreds of managers, A lot of institutional knowledge, helpful infrastructure for said company, and deep ties between companies ?

Come to think of it, it has many similarities to Google X. But that's extremely hard to build.

You're describing Ycombinator.

Sure, though from what I found the Vision Fund is about 10x larger than Ycombinator, so doing the Ycon thing at a VF level would probably involve some scaling challenges. But fundamentally, it seems a better way to go about things than putting nearly all of your eggs into late-stage start ups with highly correlated business models & failure modes.

Since when did YC have hundreds of managers?

Where do you get the people to entrust millions or billions? The organization will be flooded with networks of people who will scam away all money.

Such an organization has to be grown slowly. But that takes too much time if you have the opportunity to manage huge amounts of money right away.

There has been disappointingly little success from all of Google X's many investment dollars. I think with the hundreds of managers, institutional knowledge and helpful infrastructure comes a bureaucracy that kills a lot of what it creates.

you're right that Google X is a money sink - one of the first things Ruth Porat did when she came in is take an axe to it as it had been a sore point with instutitional investors for a while

"lets do Google X but with $100 billion" is a laughable business model

Unless your goals are wealth redistribution and job creation and science...

>Google X is a money sink

Dunno. I'm not quite sure of the figures but in 2015 they put in $3.5bn for the year. Against that Waymo which came out of X was recently valued at $105bn (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-cut-40percen...)

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